Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You may know that Joe Houston worked on Dishonored, or you may remember his considered and compelling words on violence in games, but not enough people seem to know about Unwritten: That Which Happened, the game in development at Joe’s new independent studio, Roxlou Games. Unwritten is one of the most intriguing in the crop of turn-based titles moving through the crowd-funding space, with a focus that lies as much on narrative as combat and tactics. It’ll need a strong final week to reach its $75,000 goal. I spoke to Joe to find out more about the game, going indie and storytelling.

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Just before Christmas, Nathan wrote a piece asking for a conversation about the role gaming violence plays in our lives. And as so many have when discussing the topic, he featured an image from Dishonored at the top – a man getting stabbed through the neck. For Joe Houston, the former Arkane developer who created that stabbing scene, this was the prompt he needed to give his own perspective on the subject.

Whenever I’m clicking my way through game industry opinion articles, I tend to get hung up on pieces about video game violence. This is mostly because the image plastered across the top of the post is a screen grab from Dishonored. You know, the one where a member of the city watch gets his jugular opened in a first-person blast of arterial spray. But it’s not the shock of that image that stops me. No, I pause because I’m the guy that wrote the code to make the player do that in the first place.

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